Hours passed. He could feel them dragging, stretching, bending. The weight of the night only grew heavier. Too heavy. Unnaturally heavy. As if the world itself was being forced to stay asleep.
By the ti he realized the unease knotting in his stomach wasn't just paranoia but instinct screaming at him, it was already too late.
Across the empire, the citizens stirred in their hos, yawning, stretching, reaching automatically for morning tasks, yet sothing felt off.
Their bodies felt awake, their minds felt slightly sluggish. Their hearts… confused.
"Did I wake too early?" "Why is it still dark…?" "Is this a dream?"
Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands stepped out of their houses holding oil lamps, expecting dawn's edge to greet them.
Instead, what greeted them froze their voices in their throats.
The moon hung low and swollen, dyed in a sickly red so dark it looked almost bruised.
Behind them, from every alley and corner, ca the sound of slow breathing, like bellows sucking in air through clogged throats.
The citizens turned their lamps and the light fell upon them.
Thralls.
Not moving, not snarling, not attacking. Just standing.
Shoulders slack, limbs doll-like, heads tilted at impossible angles. Like puppets whose strings had been montarily dropped.
Yet their chests rose and fell in a slow, unnatural rhythm. Alive, awake and Waiting.
A scream finally broke from sowhere near the market district, and the fragile quiet shattered like glass.
Inside the palace, Chen felt the shift the mont he opened his door.
The corridors were drenched in a suffocating silence, not empty, but dense with the thick, stifled breathing of dozens of people paralyzed by fear.
Soldiers hiding behind pillars, servants pressed against walls. Attendants huddled in corners, hands shaking over their own mouths to keep from crying out.
He could hear all of them.
This silence, this breathless dread, this frozen night… It was not the response he expected. And whatever this was, it made the consequences of his own actions feel small in comparison.
He took another step forward, listening to the heavy, frightened breathing around him.
It was only when he stepped fully into the corridor that Chen truly saw what surrounded him.
Through the palace windows, through the high arches and open balcony fras, the red-hued moon hung like a wound in the sky. Its unnatural glow washed over the empire, revealing thralls standing motionless as far as his eyes could reach. They filled the streets. They filled the palace grounds. They stood at the borders of every shadow.
A slow shiver ran through Chen's spine.
He frowned, when all of a sudden fear gripped him so tightly it forced his breath shallow. His legs trembled, not enough to collapse, but enough that he felt each shake in his bones.
And then, footsteps behind him.
The sa room he had walked out from monts ago opened again.
Roth erged.
Impossible beauty wrapped in an unnerving stillness. Tall, taller than any normal man, standing like a small giant under the red light.
His eyes glowed a deep, bleeding red, like the moon itself had poured its color into them.
Behind him stood the two godlings Chen had captured. Awake now.
Heads bowed low. Their attention fixed away from him, as if Chen had beco the least significant thing in their world.
Roth walked forward. He didn't spare Chen more than a passing glance, the sa way the godlings ignored him entirely. His focus was fixed elsewhere.
Past the palace walls, past the city. Toward the lakeside.
There, the old man who had been walking ho earlier continued toward the lake with unbroken routine, as though the world had not changed at all. He sat at the water's edge and cast his fishing rod, the movent calm and practiced.
The old man subtly tilted his hat up and nodded toward Roth, acknowledging the gaze. Roth returned the nod, the motion small yet deliberate, before he finally turned away from the lake and faced Chen.
Silence stretched for one heavy mont.
When Roth spoke, his voice was hoarse, ragged from disuse. He rarely spoke at all, and it showed.
"I now stand before you as you wanted," he said "What manner of plan and design do you have for now?"
His words held no accusation. No anger, just a direct, heavy question, one Chen now felt dangerously unprepared to answer under the weight of the unmoving night.
Chen opened his mouth to speak, but the words refused to co.
The mont Roth's eyes fell fully on him, those red, bleeding irises that looked as if they saw everything and nothing his throat tightened. The fear that had been quietly gnawing at him surged upward, choking any attempt at explanation.
He forced himself to breathe.
Once, twice.
But under Roth's gaze, even air felt heavy.
"I…" His voice cracked.
The two godlings behind Roth didn't shift at the sound, didn't lift their heads, didn't acknowledge him at all. Their submission, their stillness, only deepened the pressure weighing down on him.
He tried again.
"I wanted...." His tongue stilled.
Because now that Roth stood before him, now that all of this, this night, this red moon, this unnatural stillness had co pressing down at once, Chen realized sothing terrifying:
He had a lot to stay but before the power exuding from the figure he found he had nothing to say.
He had acted thinking it would draw two man, who would go for each other throat… yet now everything felt off. Wrong. Too much. As if reality itself had shifted in response, and not in the way he intended.
Roth watched him without impatience.
If anything, he looked… hollowly curious. Not expecting a clever sche and not expecting an elaborate plan.
Just expecting Chen's truth.
Chen swallowed again, his voice trembling despite all his attempts to steady it.
"I wanted you to co to ," he managed, barely above a whisper.
"I thought, if I forced your hand. My father would…" His words faltered, his courage wavering "…would finally confront ."
Another breath, shakier than the last "But this isn't what I expected."
His hands clenched at his sides.
"I don't understand what is happening."
In response to Chen's trembling words, Roth showed no reaction. He simply lifted a single finger.
The nail was long, dark, and sharply pointed almost like an obsidian claw and Roth pointed it directly at Chen's heart.
The gesture was small, the effect was not.
Chen's entire body seized.
He collapsed instantly, knees slamming against the cold stone floor before he even understood what had happened. His hands flew to his chest, fingers curling helplessly as pain exploded through him like a burst of fire.
Just pain raw, rciless, internal.
And he wasn't alone.
Across the entirety of Nana world, every mortal and godlings dropped where they stood.
Farrs in their fields, still half-awake. rchants unlocking their shops, children rubbing their eyes. Even those still in bed. They all clutched their chests, gasping.
It wasn't agony, not like Chen's but every heart beat in violent, thundering pulses. Like drums hamred by unseen hands. Blood surged through their veins too fast, too hot, as if it wanted to tear free from their bodies entirely.
Cries rose across the cities. A low, collective tremor of fear spread through the empire and world at the sa ti.
Yet the thralls remained still.
And Roth did not look away from Chen.
"You are a weak, caged bird abandoned by its owner," Roth said, his voice steady and hoarse. "Even with no owner around, you keep yourself locked in the very cage you built using your fear, using your own weakness, pretending it is comfort."
Chen could barely breathe. His vision blurred, his heart felt like it might burst.
"It seems even this fragile comfort has deceived you into believing you have grown bold," Roth continued, his expression empty, the red in his eyes deepening. "Weak and miserable… daring to play gas with beings and things so far above you."
Roth's finger shifted.
Not pointing now, lifting.
Chen's body rose from the ground instantly, weightless under Roth's control. His limbs dangled, shaking uncontrollably from the lingering shock of the pain. His chest still throbbed with each forced breath.
The godlings behind Roth who also were clenching their chest did not move. They did not intervene, they simply watched with bowed heads.
"This power," Roth said, tone unchanged, "the one that terrifies you so greatly it freezes your voice and bends your knees…"
He let the words sink in.
"…is a power your father commands with ease."
Chen's eyes widened more in fear than in recognition as he knew the truth in word of the demigod before him.
Roth's head tilted slightly.
"What," he asked, "did you think you would achieve by trying to force him out of his place of hiding?"
"Your father is playing a much more dangerous ga," Roth said, his voice low "and has no ti for you as you think he does."
Chen's breath trembled in his suspended body. The pain in his chest had dulled, but its echo lingered like a fist still pressed against his heart.
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